Read Dark Tidings: Ancient Magic Meets the Internet Book 1 Online

Authors: Ken Magee

Tags: #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fantasy, #Paranormal & Urban, #Teen & Young Adult

Dark Tidings: Ancient Magic Meets the Internet Book 1 (9 page)

BOOK: Dark Tidings: Ancient Magic Meets the Internet Book 1
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Chapter 16 - Have a Little Faith

“Thanks Michael, you really are brilliant. I don’t know how we ever managed without you.”

Another problem solved, another IT illiterate user impressed. It was bordering on unbelievable just how little the average Joe (or Jane) knew. Even the senior guys, and they were all guys, knew less than a typical schoolboy. Impressing these people was so easy.

“No worries. If I can’t fix it, then it ain’t broke,” he said before moving off to tackle the next mini-crisis. No doubt it’d be yet another case of ‘pilot error’ as he liked to label the majority of problems he encountered. Put simply, no one round here knew how to use a computer properly. Indeed, very few knew how to use a computer at all. It was great for him though because even the simplest problem solved added to his growing reputation.

He’d also started to make a few decent work friends. They all seemed to be of the female variety, which tended to be the way with him. He defined ‘work friends’ as people you like to spend time with in work, although they weren’t the sort of people you’d choose to share your own time with.

He’d also made one very special friend, namely the pretty girl he’d met on day one at reception. Faith had been with IIBE for nearly four years; an old timer in terms of this company. Most lower-level people stayed for less than two years before moving on. Some left as soon as they found their next CV building opportunity, some left once they realised how corrupt this company actually was.

Okay, ego had played a part in the attraction, initially anyway. She’d seemed to latch onto him from that first meeting. Now, she always went out of her way to welcome him when he entered the building, no matter how busy she seemed. She was interested in what he did, what his job responsibilities were and how he’d learnt to be ‘so clever’, as she described him on more than one occasion. She was hard not to like, particularly for someone with an ego like his.

She was twenty and she was supremely pretty, far and away the most beautiful woman he’d ever known; classically beautiful by anyone’s standards. She had short dark hair, a swarthy complexion, bright brown eyes and high cheekbones. It wasn’t so much that she was easy to look at, but more that it was impossible not to stare at her. She drew your eyes towards her, but as you looked you couldn’t quite pinpoint why. Or was it just him?

She also had the strangest of accents, a confusing fusion of London English, North American with a hint of Australian; he was totally intrigued by the way she spoke. In summary, she had everything which attracted him and a lot more besides.

They’d been out for a few after-work drinks together and he’d been taken by the bubbling chemistry between them. He wasn’t going to rush things, but he loved the fact that she already liked him, after all she’d told him so on more than one occasion.

Once, he’d taken her to a rather intimate boutique pub near the office. He chose it precisely because of its intimacy. He wanted a proper talk, not the stilted and stifled shouting exchanges they’d been forced to endure in some of the other busier places they’d been to.

They chatted about families, friends, enemies, previous relationships (that brought up enemies again), work, childhood, likes and dislikes. He couldn’t remember anyone being so interested in him before. She was continually asking questions about his background, his aspirations and what he thought about work. He loved the way she took such an interest in him and everything he did.

There was only one thing which seemed to bug her; she didn’t like his facial hair, but then again, neither did he. The hair was part of his big plan, but he wasn’t telling her about the plan… yet.

She shared little intimacies, like the story of how her parents had tried for ages to have a baby. They’d been frustrated by phantom pregnancies and two miscarriages. They’d tried all the old wives recommendations, they’d used medical interventions and they’d prayed for help. They were on the verge of giving up when her mum got pregnant and ran to full term. When the day she was born finally came, apparently her mother had cried relentlessly as she held her in her arms. She had never been so happy.

“This is our perfect reward. Our prayers have been answered. All we needed was a little faith. A little faith,” her mother had said through the tears. “That’s what we’ll call her, our little Faith.”

He also loved her sense of fun. She didn’t really tell jokes as such; she just kept on saying things which he found endearingly amusing. He remembered telling her once that she should smile more because he loved her smile so much.

“It would hurt my face if I smiled every time I felt like it. Honestly, I’m a really happy person. I just don’t show it… or feel it.” She smiled widely. “Only joking, I know you know how happy you make me.”

She sometimes wore her sense of humour on her chest. He loved her taste in amusing t-shirts. His favourite read ‘Six out of seven dwarfs are not happy’. It was doubly funny when she was beside him because he was just over six feet tall and she barely scraped the five foot mark. The last day she wore it, she said he made her the one out of seven, happy. That made him happy too. She was Happy one and he was Happy two.

They found they’d lots in common and when it was time to go home she told him she’d never felt as close to anyone else after such a short time. This was really promising, although he knew it could potentially be a problem later because she seemed to really like IIBE. He wasn’t sure where her loyalties would lie when it came to the crunch, and a mighty crunch was coming sooner rather than later.

That was a problem for another time. He’d much more complex work problems to solve in the short term; difficult technical problems which taxed him to his limits. The bank had massive international networks and any small disruption to the millions of transactions which ran round the wires set off system alarms all over the place. His primary role was to fix the breaks, reinstate the systems and keep things running smoothly. Even the smallest interruption in the service could cost the bank hundreds of thousands of pounds. The faster he fixed problems, the more money they made and the more they valued and trusted him.

Mr Toner, the Chief Technical Officer, had certainly taken a shine to him. He understood most of the complexities associated with the bank’s technical infrastructure so he definitely respected Michael’s skills and capabilities. To prove the point, he’d told him he was in line for a significant salary increase if he kept up the good work.

“There could be a number of big promotions for you over the next few years. Play your cards right and you could have my job before too long.”

Toner was in for a very nasty surprise indeed. He would probably be changing jobs sooner than he thought, but it wasn’t going to be by way of the promotion he was hoping for.

Chapter 17 - Run

Madrick was the first to rouse. His first thoughts, futile hopes really, were that the bar, the crowd, the drunken spectacle and the chickens had all been a horrible nightmare. It didn’t take him long to realise it had all really happened. This was a complete disaster. They’d engineered a near perfect escape and now it had been jeopardised by this idiot who still slept noisily beside him. Their freedom had been put at risk by this cretin who was completely oblivious to his own stupidity.

He tried to wake Tung by screaming maniacally into his ear. It was loud enough to waken the dead, but it didn’t waken Tung. He tried again by poking the massive bump on his head, and he poked it hard. Tung screamed with pain and began a slow, throbbing ascent back into consciousness.

“You are a fool,” screamed Madrick. “Have you any idea what you’ve done?”

“Huh? Why are you shouting at me?”

“Why am I Shouting? I’m shouting because you’re an idiot. You’re wasting your life away being an idiot.”

“Listen, old man,” said Tung, “it’s not easy being an idiot, you know?”

“Right. If it was easy, I suppose everyone would do it?”

“What?”

Madrick ranted and raved a bit more about his stupidity, although he soon realised that Tung was suffering too much to pay any heed to his chastisement. He was too busy being crushed by the pain of a fierce ale hangover compounded by two headfirst floor collisions; not to mention the ‘normal’ headache resulting from spell saying.

It was going to be some time before there’d be any sort of sensible conversation so Madrick hauled him to his feet and pulled him out of the barn. He supported his weight as best he could, almost dragging him along as they started to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the town.

Fleeing at top speed was their best, no, it was their only option. Mifal was certain to have heard about last night and he would’ve sent out teams of his soldiers to capture or kill them. What he didn’t know, and this was even more frightening, was that both the Black and White wizards had also dispatched specialist hunters to track them down.

Being Mifal’s prey was a frightening enough prospect, so Madrick put all his effort into helping this dead-weight fugitive run away, although walk away slowly was a better description of their clumsy getaway. Tung was in no fit state to travel under his own steam so Madrick had to cart the semi-conscious lump along the dirt track. He tried everything, starting with ‘carroty’ encouragement followed quickly by ‘sticky’ scare tactics.

“Move yourself, Tung,” he badgered. “They’re on our trail and woe betide us if they catch us. We must make haste and keep distance between us and those evil men who pursue us. I don’t want to be back in that dungeon. I, for one, don’t want to be a plaything in the hands of Mifal’s torturers.”

It had little effect on Tung. After a lot more than half an hour and a lot less than half a mile, Madrick realised the futility of this mode of escape. He released his hold on Tung who promptly slid to the ground, fell backwards and smacked his head hard on the only protruding rock for yards around.

“Wake up, you moron. We need a spell which will get out of here fast… or, at the very least, a little bit faster. Another Stallion Spell would be perfect, however knowing you we’re more likely to end up with a plague of rats or an everlasting lantern.”

The fact of the matter was there’d be no spell at all for a while; Tung was out for the count.

☼☼☼

Back at the castle, the king had been told of the strange goings-on in The Black Bear tavern the night before. He knew it was probably Madrick and the thief however, he couldn’t be seen to accept any such explanation. If he did, his subjects would know he’d been wrong about the wizard turning into the stallion and he never ever admitted to being wrong. He believed his people thought he was infallible, but he was wrong about that too. He definitely had to find an alternative story. If he said it was Madrick who had been at the centre of the chicken incident, the people would surely hate him even more, because he would have tortured an innocent horse to death. Torturing a guilty horse was barely acceptable.

So he decreed that an evil pair of demons had visited themselves on the townsfolk and played chicken with them. As the great defender of his subjects he, Mifal, would send a squad of his best soldiers to slay these devils and make his people safe again. That would surely make him popular with the populous so the squad was assembled, briefed and duly dispatched.

☼☼☼

At the Sorebun Academy, which was the headquarters of the Order of White Wizards, word had filtered through about the magical incident in the inn. The Great Grand Wizard and the six Under-Grand Wizards were meeting to decide what they should do about it. From the stories it was clear there was a scroll in the hands of a buffoon and that posed many dangers as evidenced by the chicken debacle. Equally important, there was a scroll which needed to be tracked down and brought to the White Library.

They discussed the spell. It appeared to be a minor scroll, the Chicken Transformation Spell, it merely metamorphosed men into chickens for forty-eight hours. The men would be back to normal soon and they would remember little of their ordeal. Nonetheless every scroll was important and every scroll they had was one less for the Black Order.

They discussed how they would track it down and eventually decided to send Gravalar, one of their top stalkers, to find the idiots and retrieve the scroll. So he was summoned, briefed and duly dispatched.

☼☼☼

At Devil Lair Keep, which was the headquarters of the Order of Black Wizards, word had also filtered through about the weird chicken happening. A meeting of the Council was hastily convened and they concluded that there was something very curious about the incident. While it seemed to centre on a minor scroll, their guts told them that something more out of the ordinary was involved here. For that reason they decided to send Stanverital and Devligrate, two of their top assassins, on the trail.

They were treating this happening with unusual urgency because their instincts told them that something epic was happening. Anyway, the Whites would be on the trail too and they wanted to beat them at all costs. So, without any undue delay, the assassins were summoned, briefed and duly dispatched.

☼☼☼

Never before in recorded history, or unrecorded history for that matter, had so many frightening and skilful individuals been sent on the trail of such ordinary and rather pathetic common folk.

Chapter 18 - 10 Types of People

Michael had settled seamlessly into the routine at IIBE. His feet were well and truly under the proverbial desk. He had a strong and growing reputation; he had engaged with every one of the important people he had targeted and, without exception, they all now trusted him to get the job done. They all, to a man, and they were all men, openly praised his contribution to the organisation. He had done everything he could have done in his first few weeks to become liked as well as respected.

It was the same everywhere, but people didn’t generally tend to become friends with the computer support geeks because they knew too much and were usually a bit strange. To counteract this he had developed a range of techniques to ingratiate himself with his ‘using’ public. For example, he loved to trot out stock phrases which he knew the non-technical folk appreciated. Things like ‘Computers should work. People should think.’ and ‘A computer will always do what you tell it to do, but rarely what you want it to do.’

He knew that these phrases, and ones like them, made people feel good about themselves and made them feel less threatened by the mysterious systems which seemed to have become such an integral part of their lives. It was important to recognise that the average person was intimidated by computers, so part of his job was to make ‘the system’ seem more friendly.

He still liked to do the geeky things, so the geeks liked him as well. He had a notice on his desk which read ‘There are 10 types of people, those who know binary and those who don’t.’ The geeks got it, but he had a layman’s explanation which made the other folk laugh too.

“In binary one-zero represents the number two. There are only two states in binary, one or zero, on or off. Or to put it another way, binary is either stupid or it is not.”

“Stupid,” they invariably replied and felt better for it.

He reckoned this made him look smart and likeable, a win-win in anyone’s book, or technical manual, depending on who he was talking to at the time.

He had adopted lots of other different approaches to make people like him, for example, he had done a number of homers for a select few; fixed their personal PCs, made their home networks work or helped them choose the best printers to buy. Things like that were easy for him, but always seemed terribly difficult for the average Joe. It was another Homer who’d warned, many centuries before, ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts’. They didn’t take his advice back then and he hoped no one would take his advice about ‘geeks bearing gifts’ now.

Not only did the average employee like him, the bosses also liked him. He’d concentrated a lot of his efforts on impressing them. He knew the more important the person, the more of his time they deserved; after all they were the ones who could give him what he needed. They were the ones who could, and indeed already had, elevated his security rating so he now had access to pretty much any system within the organisation.

He’d even been able to check his own personnel records. The bank had made a few candid observations about him, although there was nothing in the files for him to worry about. For fun, he made a few undetectable changes to his records, for example, he now had a verified university degree, a PhD no less, and a long history of voluntary charity work. He also upped his salary, just to prove to himself he could.

His new higher level security clearance allowed him to come and go as he pleased which meant he could choose times when there were fewer prying eyes around to spot him messing with their systems. In parallel with creating his trustworthy reputation, he’d also put many of his plan’s fundamental building blocks in place. He’d disabled specific parts of the Noviru hacking protection package so he could invisibly infect the system with little modules of his own software. These modules gave him secret entry points into the key systems which, when the time came, would let him manipulate the swathes of money which swished through the bank’s network.

It was all going well and he’d pretty much achieved everything he’d set out to achieve. He was ready for the next phase of his plan. He’d soon begin to siphon off relatively small sums of money into random bank accounts all over the world. Interestingly, these bank accounts didn’t belong to him so, when the problem was discovered, the full force of the security department would rush off in pointless directions to try and work out who was benefiting from this fraud. Clever or what?

When their attention was elsewhere, when they were completely distracted, that’s when he’d go in for the kill.

BOOK: Dark Tidings: Ancient Magic Meets the Internet Book 1
13.8Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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